Let's face it, he’s no Harry Houdini. But for a man in a fiscal straitjacket,
George Osborne just about wriggled himself free.

Almost everywhere you looked, the Chancellor’s hands – and feet – were tied. He had been banking on 2.1 per cent growth this year but now had to settle for 1.7 per cent – a legacy of the pre-Christmas snow that turned the whole economy parky.

Then there was his gift from Gordon Brown: a thumping overdraft. True, at a forecast £146 billion this year the deficit is a couple of billion lower than earlier estimates. But the £8 billion drop some pundits were looking for was nowhere to be seen, while Mr Osborne’s credibility with the markets rests on his ability to keep the cuts coming.

Add in Tuesday’s higher than expected inflation, with the Consumer Prices Index hitting a 28-month high of 4.4 per cent in January, and the Chancellor had precious little room for manoeuvre.

Given such constraints then, you have to hand it to Mr Osborne: he conjured up a Budget that went further than simply making the best of a bad job. And he did it in a way that signalled the principal difference between this Government and the last lot. Whereas Mr Brown insisted he knew how to spend our money better than we did, and built a bloated client state to prove it, Mr Osborne has put business — and specifically private enterprise — at the heart of Britain’s economic recovery.

For those who tend to switch off during a Budget when the business reforms are announced, it would have been tough going yesterday.

Almost the entire speech was taken up with the Chancellor’s “four economic ambitions” – to have the most competitive tax system in the G20; be the most business-friendly place in Europe for starting a company; to wean us off our dependence on the City’s pinstripes via investment in manufacturing; and somehow produce an educated, flexible workforce.

Clearly, they are bold aspirations, not least the last two. But at least, you get a sense of the direction of travel. He made a decent start, with this year’s surprise 2 percentage points cut in corporation tax universally welcomed by business – as was the news that by 2014-15, the rate would be down to 23 per cent, the best in the G7.

Drill into the detail and you find Mr Osborne seeing the bigger picture. Arcane though it is, his reform of the “controlled foreign companies” rules show a Chancellor focused on the bigger prize of keeping multinationals and the jobs they create in Britain, rather than watch uncompetitive tax rates drive the likes of WPP, UBM and Shire to Ireland. After yesterday, the business publisher UBM said it might come back.

The Budget was cute politically too. Most of the tax breaks for entrepreneurs are coming from populist levies on bankers, tax avoiders and polluters. Not many people are going to complain about that. And, while windfall taxes grate, Mr Osborne will lose few votes by taxing Big Oil to reduce the prices at the pumps.

There are caveats. Given that the Chancellor clearly buys the logic of cutting taxes to stimulate economic activity, simply freezing air passenger duty didn’t go far enough, particularly for an island nation that should be encouraging tourism, which is one of the quickest ways to inject some foreign cash into the economy.

Sooner or later too, the Government has to stop kicking the banks, which are crucial to any private sector-led recovery, even if greedy individual bankers offer such an easy target.

But even Houdini might admire a thing or two. “No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth,” the escapologist once said. With luck, that’s a trick Mr Osborne won’t even have to learn.